SF Chron Declines To Print Reports of Confessed Terrorist Motives. Loads Up "Mental Instability" Template Instead.
When Smooth Stone predicted this morning that the MSM would find ways not to mention that San Fran hit and run driver Omeed Aziz Popal is a self-declared terrorist, he probably wasn't counting on Drudge to roll in with "VIDEO: Witness says driver declared himself a 'terrorist'..." (which is actually the same link that Smooth Stone posts).
Let's review: we have a crime that involves an attack on Jews. Many if not most of the elements of the crime are similar to the essential aspects of past crimes generally acknowledged to be domestic terrorism. And we have reports from local witnesses that the criminal explicitly declared himself to be a terrorist. Now, let's acknowledge that not all attacks on American Jews by Muslims are terrorism, that crimes can look like terrorism without being terrorism, and that the witnesses may be wrong - in other words, there's always the chance that there will turn out to be alternative explanations for the multiple indications that this was terrorism. Fair enough. But how do you justify - if, say, you're the SF Chron - not even printing the suspect's religion. What was the chain of logic that justified including "[a]t Frankie's Bohemian Cafe at Divisadero and Pine, a man named William, who asked that his last name not be used, said he had been walking south on Divisadero when "we heard the thump, turned around, saw bodies flying''" instead of the fact that this suspect shares a characteristic with the last few people who committed crimes just like this one.
Instead, we get the increasingly eye roll-inducing "history of mental problems" template. We've now gone through this routine enough times to describe with some confidence what will happen in the day or two after an attack like this, where a lone Muslim man in the United States attacks multiple Jews: (a) local and federal authorities will clarify that, despite the act resembling terrorism in every way, improbably it turns out that terrorism was not in fact committed (b) the vast majority of journalists will neglect to inform readers of the shooter's religion or ethnicity - they probably just figure that it would add nothing to the context of the story, since presumably no one has managed to pick out any similarities between all the Muslim men who have committed mass attacks on American Jews in the last few months (c) the vast majority of journalists will also neglect to print certain things that might, at first glance, seem helpful to readers who want to figure out the suspects' likely motives - things like the suspects' declarations at the scene where they state that they were committing terrorism or fighting against Jews (d) the suspect will be declared mentally unstable.
And so, as we've had to do every other time (because this pattern really has happened every other time), let's go over how sentences and logic work. In English, the operator "and" is available to language users seeking to create complex sentences. For any two well formed statements, there exists a world in which the complex sentence created by linking them with "and" is true. In other words, we can take the two statements "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant Jewish woman is mentally unstable" and "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant woman is a terrorist" and combine them. The combined statement is "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant Jewish woman is mentally unstable and is a terrorist" (or, more conversationally, "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant Jewish woman is a mentally unstable terrorist"). So when journalists inform us that an attempted mass murderer is mentally shaky, that's both a painfully obvious and an almost certainly incomplete presentation of what they know. "Mental instability" is a definition of a mass murder, not journalism - so filling up the "give the suspect's background" part of a news article by printing information about their mental health is really just a way of avoiding having to convey things that the journalist may find uncomfortable. And since it's almost definitionally true that a terrorist will have some degree of mental damage, the journalist has a built-in way not to have to describe things like family, religion, national background, etc. That a religiously-inspired mass murderer has psychological problems is the perfect journalistic go-to - true and therefore professionally safe, but totally unhelpful. Which is why we've seen volumes of that kind of journalism after each of these incidents.
It just so happens that in this particular case, the guy isn't even mentally ill in any significant sense (oh wait... but the family says diagrees!) So not only did outlets like the SF Chron pull the predictable and usually reliable where they printed "news" of mental instability as a substitute for information about the suspect's background... this time they had a run of bad luck and they don't even have their usual excuse that what they're saying is technically true. No wonder these news cycles are getting so predictable - the journalists don't even bother to check if their apologist narrative fits the facts on the ground. They just get the suspects name, the number of victims, and the time of the attack. Then they insert them into their available, crafted-to-never-ever-ever-ever-mention-religion template, and take the rest of the day off to go brainstorm bumper stickers about how much smarter they are then President Bush.
(nb. We don't really have any evidence to justify the statement that MSM journalists spend significant amounts of time brainstorming bumper sticker slogans. The stuff about how journalists are writing about these attacks using a prefabbed, ideologically designed journalistic narrative meant to obfuscate or exclude clear evidence of terrorism... if that wasn't obvious before, the fact that they automatically used it even though the suspect wasn't clinically insane is a symptomatic slip too far)
UPDATE: We don't think we took sufficient time during the original post to sit back and contemplate the brilliance of the SF Chron mental health article. Imagine you're the journalist covering this. On one hand, you're supposed to be using your paper's carefully designed "mental problems" template (because there certain facts that would just needlessly confuse the public, so why print them anyway?). On the other hand, you can't honestly see a way around printing that "those involved in the investigation... discount any mental illness, saying the 29-year-old Afghanistan native seemed coherent, unrepentant and claimed that he repeatedly drove at pedestrians because he "just wanted to."" Solution? Headline with a technically true statement that reinforces your mental instability frame: "DRIVER'S RAMPAGE THE HUMAN TOLL SUSPECT: Family cites history of mental problems". This way, the 90% or so of people who never really get past the lede of a story can put down the paper, reassured that they don't have to worry about radical Muslims attacking Jews - but maybe feeling a little bit sad about all the recent violent attacks
UPDATE 2: It seems like half of Allahpundit's life nowadays is spent preventing prominent conservative blogs from devolving into swamps of bad conspiracy theorizing. And he's right to be as careful as he's being: it's well worth missing a Reuters hoax if it means that the Left gets to keep their near monopoly on the inane, self-reinforcing cycle of "look at this seemingly irrelevant detail which is the key to a massive conspiracy" / "good job - we're so powerful - don't listen to the people presenting contrary evidence, they're just doing that because they know we're on to them. And so here's his post making the case for this guy is just a regular, non-jihadi lunatic, complete with links to a history of mental problems. Those links don't really surprise us - in proper conspiracy theory fashion, we're well prepared to integrate the fact that the SF Chron is pumping out article after article shoring up their no-terrorism-here framing of the story. The actual fact that Popal had been in a clinic is a little more problematic, but listen - our entire point is that all jihadis are to one degree or another mentally disturbed. The question is why mental instability in some Muslim-American men has expressed itself in violence against Jews, while mental instability in men of other backgrounds doesn't seem to consistently display this kind of symptom.
UPDATE 3: And if all else fails, there's still the psychoanalytic point - just because the press's terrorist-apologizing "mental instability" narrative is coincidentally accurate this time doesn't mean that that's why they choose to report the story that way (if push us a little on this argument and we'll probably give it up... maybe)
Let's review: we have a crime that involves an attack on Jews. Many if not most of the elements of the crime are similar to the essential aspects of past crimes generally acknowledged to be domestic terrorism. And we have reports from local witnesses that the criminal explicitly declared himself to be a terrorist. Now, let's acknowledge that not all attacks on American Jews by Muslims are terrorism, that crimes can look like terrorism without being terrorism, and that the witnesses may be wrong - in other words, there's always the chance that there will turn out to be alternative explanations for the multiple indications that this was terrorism. Fair enough. But how do you justify - if, say, you're the SF Chron - not even printing the suspect's religion. What was the chain of logic that justified including "[a]t Frankie's Bohemian Cafe at Divisadero and Pine, a man named William, who asked that his last name not be used, said he had been walking south on Divisadero when "we heard the thump, turned around, saw bodies flying''" instead of the fact that this suspect shares a characteristic with the last few people who committed crimes just like this one.
Instead, we get the increasingly eye roll-inducing "history of mental problems" template. We've now gone through this routine enough times to describe with some confidence what will happen in the day or two after an attack like this, where a lone Muslim man in the United States attacks multiple Jews: (a) local and federal authorities will clarify that, despite the act resembling terrorism in every way, improbably it turns out that terrorism was not in fact committed (b) the vast majority of journalists will neglect to inform readers of the shooter's religion or ethnicity - they probably just figure that it would add nothing to the context of the story, since presumably no one has managed to pick out any similarities between all the Muslim men who have committed mass attacks on American Jews in the last few months (c) the vast majority of journalists will also neglect to print certain things that might, at first glance, seem helpful to readers who want to figure out the suspects' likely motives - things like the suspects' declarations at the scene where they state that they were committing terrorism or fighting against Jews (d) the suspect will be declared mentally unstable.
And so, as we've had to do every other time (because this pattern really has happened every other time), let's go over how sentences and logic work. In English, the operator "and" is available to language users seeking to create complex sentences. For any two well formed statements, there exists a world in which the complex sentence created by linking them with "and" is true. In other words, we can take the two statements "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant Jewish woman is mentally unstable" and "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant woman is a terrorist" and combine them. The combined statement is "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant Jewish woman is mentally unstable and is a terrorist" (or, more conversationally, "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant Jewish woman is a mentally unstable terrorist"). So when journalists inform us that an attempted mass murderer is mentally shaky, that's both a painfully obvious and an almost certainly incomplete presentation of what they know. "Mental instability" is a definition of a mass murder, not journalism - so filling up the "give the suspect's background" part of a news article by printing information about their mental health is really just a way of avoiding having to convey things that the journalist may find uncomfortable. And since it's almost definitionally true that a terrorist will have some degree of mental damage, the journalist has a built-in way not to have to describe things like family, religion, national background, etc. That a religiously-inspired mass murderer has psychological problems is the perfect journalistic go-to - true and therefore professionally safe, but totally unhelpful. Which is why we've seen volumes of that kind of journalism after each of these incidents.
It just so happens that in this particular case, the guy isn't even mentally ill in any significant sense (oh wait... but the family says diagrees!) So not only did outlets like the SF Chron pull the predictable and usually reliable where they printed "news" of mental instability as a substitute for information about the suspect's background... this time they had a run of bad luck and they don't even have their usual excuse that what they're saying is technically true. No wonder these news cycles are getting so predictable - the journalists don't even bother to check if their apologist narrative fits the facts on the ground. They just get the suspects name, the number of victims, and the time of the attack. Then they insert them into their available, crafted-to-never-ever-ever-ever-mention-religion template, and take the rest of the day off to go brainstorm bumper stickers about how much smarter they are then President Bush.
(nb. We don't really have any evidence to justify the statement that MSM journalists spend significant amounts of time brainstorming bumper sticker slogans. The stuff about how journalists are writing about these attacks using a prefabbed, ideologically designed journalistic narrative meant to obfuscate or exclude clear evidence of terrorism... if that wasn't obvious before, the fact that they automatically used it even though the suspect wasn't clinically insane is a symptomatic slip too far)
UPDATE: We don't think we took sufficient time during the original post to sit back and contemplate the brilliance of the SF Chron mental health article. Imagine you're the journalist covering this. On one hand, you're supposed to be using your paper's carefully designed "mental problems" template (because there certain facts that would just needlessly confuse the public, so why print them anyway?). On the other hand, you can't honestly see a way around printing that "those involved in the investigation... discount any mental illness, saying the 29-year-old Afghanistan native seemed coherent, unrepentant and claimed that he repeatedly drove at pedestrians because he "just wanted to."" Solution? Headline with a technically true statement that reinforces your mental instability frame: "DRIVER'S RAMPAGE THE HUMAN TOLL SUSPECT: Family cites history of mental problems". This way, the 90% or so of people who never really get past the lede of a story can put down the paper, reassured that they don't have to worry about radical Muslims attacking Jews - but maybe feeling a little bit sad about all the recent violent attacks
UPDATE 2: It seems like half of Allahpundit's life nowadays is spent preventing prominent conservative blogs from devolving into swamps of bad conspiracy theorizing. And he's right to be as careful as he's being: it's well worth missing a Reuters hoax if it means that the Left gets to keep their near monopoly on the inane, self-reinforcing cycle of "look at this seemingly irrelevant detail which is the key to a massive conspiracy" / "good job - we're so powerful - don't listen to the people presenting contrary evidence, they're just doing that because they know we're on to them. And so here's his post making the case for this guy is just a regular, non-jihadi lunatic, complete with links to a history of mental problems. Those links don't really surprise us - in proper conspiracy theory fashion, we're well prepared to integrate the fact that the SF Chron is pumping out article after article shoring up their no-terrorism-here framing of the story. The actual fact that Popal had been in a clinic is a little more problematic, but listen - our entire point is that all jihadis are to one degree or another mentally disturbed. The question is why mental instability in some Muslim-American men has expressed itself in violence against Jews, while mental instability in men of other backgrounds doesn't seem to consistently display this kind of symptom.
UPDATE 3: And if all else fails, there's still the psychoanalytic point - just because the press's terrorist-apologizing "mental instability" narrative is coincidentally accurate this time doesn't mean that that's why they choose to report the story that way (if push us a little on this argument and we'll probably give it up... maybe)
